


Incarnadine

by Moiraine



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Angst, Community: norsekink, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-26
Updated: 2011-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-26 13:31:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moiraine/pseuds/Moiraine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” Loki says desperately, more to himself than to Thor, curling his hands into fists and then curling those into his chest.  “This wasn’t the <em>plan</em>.  No one was supposed to get <em>hurt</em>.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Incarnadine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the norsekink prompt: http://norsekink.livejournal.com/6420.html?thread=11704084#t11704084

Loki sits on the edge of the hard, narrow bed of the room he’s been put in and stares at his hands.

He’s been doing that since he was put here hours (days?) ago. They changed his clothes and washed his hands before they locked him in, but it was a hurried job, and blood is still caught under his nails and around his cuticles. He _cannot_ stop staring at the blood, and he itches to scrub every trace of it off, while at the same time he hopes it nevers leaves.

Odin’s blood.

Frigga’s blood.

His parents’ blood, splashed about their chamber and soaked into his clothes, his skin (his soul) when he’d held their broken bodies, trying to deny the reality before him, trying to fix the unfixable.

Outside the door comes the heavy tread of feet, and then the sound of a key turning in the lock. A key. A lock. They’ve imprisoned him with nothing more than mundane metal. It has never been proof against his abilities before, and it shouldn’t be now. It should be laughable, and were he not sure his laughter would dissolve into sobs, he would do so.

No, the lock to this prison is his mind and his guilt is the key, and the one will never turn in the other to release him.

He doesn’t need to look to know that it’s Thor that opens the door, Thor that enters as quietly as he can and shuts them in together. Silence hangs heavy and awful between them, drawing on and on and on, and Loki is sure the last threads of his sanity are about to snap under the strain when Thor finally speaks.

“Why?”

His brother’s voice is _tired_ , weary to a point Loki has never heard before, and congested, as if Thor has been weeping. But that’s impossible. Thor doesn’t weep, doesn’t shed womanly tears. That’s Loki’s role, and it’s another underpinning torn from his foundation, another fracture in the cracked glass of his life that reminds of just how _wrong_ everything has gone.

But most of all, Thor’s voice is _broken_. With that one word, Thor has revealed himself as weak and vulnerable, to an extent Loki has never known before. He has waited for so long (years, centuries) for such an opening to exploit, hoped for a chance such as this, and now that he has it, he finds it’s what he never wanted at all.

“Why, Loki?” Thor asks again, and Loki closes his eyes, shutting them against even the possibility of looking at his brother.

“Does it matter?” he replies, and his own voice is raw, hoarse. Those three words are the first he’s spoken since his screams of denial died with his parents.

“I don’t understand,” is Thor’s answer, and in it, Loki’s hears the appeal for mercy, for some sort of order to a world gone mad. And beneath them, Loki hears the childish plea for this to be some sort of nightmare, a request to make it all go away.

Loki knows because he wants the same thing.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” Loki says desperately, more to himself than to Thor, curling his hands into fists and then curling those into his chest. “This wasn’t the _plan_. No one was supposed to get _hurt_.”

He finally looks up, looks at his brother, whose face is drawn and haggard, gray with grief and fatigue. Blood still stains one cheek, and Loki cannot tell whose it is. He knows that he looks as mad as he feels, knows that Thor is looking at a monster in his brother’s skin, looking at the creature that killed their parents, who almost destroyed their world.

“I only ever wanted to be your equal,” he says, knowing that even as he does that anything he says can only make it worse. There is no excuse, no explanation he can give that will give the tiniest bit of comfort. So he tells the truth instead. “I wanted you to be proud of me. I wanted Father and Mother to be proud of me. I wanted save everyone, to show everything that I wasn’t weak, that I could be a hero, too.”

“A hero….” Thor is staggered by the words. “A hero. How? _How_? How could letting the jotnar into Asgard make you a hero, Brother?”

Loki makes a pained noise at the word, shaking his head dumbly like an animal. Thor shouldn’t call him that for Loki hasn’t been a brother to him in a long time (too long, and longer than Loki ever wanted). And even as he thinks that, he knows Thor will always think of him as “brother.”

“Because I was supposed to be _in time_ ,” Loki says, almost too quietly to hear, dropping his gaze once more.

Thor is silent for a long, long time, the only sound in the small room the sound of them breathing. Until finally Thor moves, slowly, ponderously, as if it is too much for him to bear. There is a faint click of metal on wood, and Loki looks up to see Thor place a dagger (his) on the small table. Thor says nothing else, but the look in his eyes in agonizingly sad, and Loki _understands_.

He waits until Thor is gone, waits until the lock is locked and he is alone once more. Then he picks the dagger up, fingers curling over the familiar hilt. _It’s not fair_ , he thinks, _that I’ll be shown this mercy while my brother has to endure_.

The blood that pools underneath his fingernails is very, very red, and it washes his hands clean.


End file.
